Law enforcement works to crack down on school bomb threats

Police say most threats are hoaxes, but they drain resources

School bomb threats drain public resources, disrupt the learning process and can have serious consequences for the culprit, and law enforcement officials said they're increasingly working to crack down on them. WMUR's Mike Cronin reports.

School bomb threats drain public resources, disrupt the learning process and can have serious consequences for the culprit, and law enforcement officials said they're increasingly working to crack down on them.

Dover High school was evacuated in January after a bomb threat was found written on a school wall. No explosives were found. Weeks later, a 17-year-old was arrested and charged with criminal threatening.

"So here we have the potential of a felony charge following a relatively young person throughout their life," Dover Capt. David Terlemezian said.

The threat was one of several made at New Hampshire schools this year.

"When something happens, we always assume that it is credible until we can verify that it is not," Dover Superintendent Elaine Arbour said.

State police use specially trained dogs, such as K-9 Mali, to find explosives. Trooper Jeffrey Dade said that usually, Mali doesn't find anything.

"Over 99 percent of them turn out to be hoaxes," Dade said. "There's never an actual IED (improvised explosive device)."

But Dade said such threats need to be taken seriously.

"I mean, it's always better to do something than nothing," he said.

The bomb squad does at least 16 hours of training each month. Last year, it responded to 25 bomb threats, mostly at schools.

The numbers have increased over the past three years, but Dade said all the threats aren't reflected in the statistics. State law requires local police and fire departments to report threats to state police, but Dade said most don't.

"I think it's in part an educational issue," he said. "Not all agencies are aware of it."

There may be a perception that bomb threats have increased, but Dade said much of that is because of increased public and media vigilance after incidents such as the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting and Boston Marathon bombing.

"So there does probably appear to be these spikes, when the reality of it is probably the amount of threats remains to be the same," Dade said.

He said most threats are done to cause a disruption or thrill, but sometimes the motivation is simpler.

"It doesn't take a crystal ball to figure out that chances are that there's some students that perhaps want to get out of school early," he said.

Kieran Ramsey is the assistant special agent in charge of counter terrorism for the FBI's Boston division and oversees New Hampshire operations. The FBI assists local departments dealing with bomb threats.

He said bomb threats hurt public safety, even if the threats aren't legitimate.

"As soon as public safety resources are being diverted to this hoax threat, now they're offline from being able to respond to legitimate issues that are out in the community," he said.

Ramsey said the FBI recently found that nationally, 38 percent of school bomb threats were received through email, 29 percent by phone and 12 percent were written. He said there has been a recent uptick in threats made on social media.

"It probably has something to do with this factor of people believing they have this shield of anonymity," Ramsey said.

Authorities said they will do whatever it takes to find those making the threats and bring them to justice.

"If we can identify the person responsible for these threats, we're going to try to make sure they suffer the full range of consequences," Ramsey said.

In response to a series of threats last fall, state police made a brochure with guidelines for local departments on how to respond to each threat. It will be distributed to each school and police and fire department in the state.